ADDEESS 



DliLIYEEED BI2F0 11U TUK 



HISTORICAL SOCIETY 



UNIVERSITY OF NORTH-CAROLINA. 



June G, 1855, 



BY 



RT. REV. BISHOP ATKINSON, 



Publiihed by, and at the request of the Society. 



RALEIGH: 
HOLDEN & WILSON, "STANDARD" OFFICE, 

1855. 



± 



[ ^^■ ■II Hj BI H »I W ■■■—■■■I. Wiy , | 



ADDRESS 



DELIVBRED BEFORE THE 



HISTORICAL SOCIETY 



OF THE 



UNIVERSITY OF NORTH-CAROLINA, 



June 6, 1855, 



BY 

RT. REV. BISHOP ATKINSON. 

A + K^-o^' 



Published by, and at the request of the Society 



RALEIGH: 

HOLDEN & WILSON, "STANDARD" OFFICE 

1855. 






In Exchange 
Univ. of North Carolina 
SEP 2 7 1933 



"5s 



ADDRESS 



Nearly two centuries have elapsed since the might}- spirit 
of Oliver Cromwell went forth to its last account, to receive 
its reward according to the deeds done in the body ; and yet 
mankind are almost as far as ever from being agreed as to 
the true character of that extraordinary person, and as to the 
nature and value of the influence he exerted on the destinies 
of our race. 

Yet, certainly, the events of his life were neither obscure 
nor ambiguous. His deeds were not done in a corner, but in 
the face of alarmed and admiring Europe. His speeches 
were uttered to listening senates, and at the head of armies. 
His letters have been preserved among the most important 
state papers of great kingdoms. Yet, with all this glare of 
light falling upon him, his moral and intellectual proportions 
seem still vague and indeterminate. 

By some persons he is regarded not only as a hero of the 
noblest type, but the purest of patriots, and scarcely less than 
the most devout of saints. By others, again, he is considered 
as a coarse, vulgar upstart — possessed, indeed, of uncommon 
abilities, but who owed his guilty elevation rather to the 
favor of circumstances, and a remarkable and detestable com- 
bination of low cunning with unscrupulous violence, than to 
any marked superiority in courage or intellect over his con- 
temporaries. The last view has been, until of late, the most 
generally received. 

It was the misfortune of Cromwell to belong to a party 
which must be, on the whole, pronounced illiterate, although 
John Milton was a member of it. It was his fault or his 
misfortune that he was at the same time disliked by the Re- 
publicans and abhorred by the Eoyalists ; that by the former 
he was regarded as the supplanter of the liberties of his coun- 
tiy — by the latter, as scarcely anything else than an incar- 
nate fiend. It was his misfortune, that the principal his- 
torian of his era was a man who disliked him personally and 



politically, but whose dislike was not so blind as to make him 
utterly insensible to the shining qualities of his enemy, and 
whose wisdom and powers of language and knowledge of his 
subject are such, that his words will never fall to the ground 
while the English language subsists. The very candor, then, 
of Clarendon, while it has made his portrait of Cromwell 
more life-like, has tended to secure the acceptance of the 
darkest tints which he has used as being true to nature. On 
the whole, if dead men know and feel the estimate in which 
they are held by their fellow creatures on earth, Cromwell 
scarcely can have been in Paradise. 

But latterly, public opinion has begun to be considerably 
modified. There were some evidences of change in the be- 
ginning of the century. ISTo less a statesman than Mr. Fox — 
himself, withal, a descendant of Charles L, though in a chan- 
nel of which he had no reason to be proud — ventured to say 
■of the execution of that king, " the act for which Cromwell 
was most denounced, that there was something in the splen- 
dor and magnanimity of it, which had served to raise the 
character of the English nation in the opinion of Europe in 
general." But in our own day, Cromwell has found an advo- 
cate who does not deal in faint praise — who is not affrighted 
by the death of Charles nor the massacre at Tredagh ; who 
sees in his hero nothing but what is right and wise, just and 
good. This is Carlyle. It must be admitted that, in rescu- 
ing from oblivion the character of Cromwell, he has done his 
work well and skilfully. He passes, with a light touch, those 
points which would shock the ordinary feelings of humanity 
in his hearers, and he brings out into most vivid light, what- 
ever can affect the imagination or bias the judgment in be- 
half of his hero. It seems, by the bye, to be a new and very 
singular feature in the literature of this age, that so much of 
it is devoted to reversing the sentence which mankind have 
pronounced on those men who have been condemned as the 
great criminals of our race. Until very lately, when the 
basest and most noxious of demagogues was to be stigmatiz- 
ed — when insolence and sycophancy, rashness and cowardice, 
vulgar ambition and mean envy were to be described in one 
word — the name of Cleon was used. But now, Mr. Grote 
has undertaken to show that he was one of the martyrs of the 



world's injustice, and was really, after all, a very proper per- 
son. So has it been with Robespierre. From that day when 
his ears, about to be cold in death, were filled with the ex- 
ulting shouts of the people of Paris rejoicing in his fate ; from 
that day, when, on the scaffold, a woman from the crowd ex- 
claimed to him, " Murderer, your agony fills me with joy ! 
Descend to hell, covered with the curses of every mother in 
France !" — from that day, till within these few years, Robes- 
pierre has been looked on, not merely as indefensible, but 
beyond the pale of human sympathy — so intensely a lover of 
himself, as to be an enemy of his race. But Lamartine 
pledges himself to the world that all this is false. 

According to him, Robespierre perished the victim of his 
virtues. Devotion to the people — that is, the oppressed por- 
tion of humanity — a passionate desire to restore liberty to the 
bondmen, equality to the humble, fraternity to the human 
race, supremacy to reason — these were his grimes. He did, 
indeed, shed blood, but with repugnance. In the meantime, 
he submitted to the most cruel humiliations and privations to 
assure that victory to the people, the fruits of which he dis- 
dained for himself. Such, we are now told in the most elo- 
quent language — such was really the man whom the world 
has execrated as hypocrite, tyrant and vampire. "When men 
of the abject nature of these demagogues — men great only in 
their wickedness — with no fire of genius, no depth of insight, 
incapable of any heroic purpose, or any act of generous self- 
forgetfulness — wfien such persons are exalted to the rank of 
heroes, no wonder that a man of consummate ability, of un- 
doubted courage, of many gentle and tender, as well as many 
high and noble traits of character, should be almost deified 
by an eccentric and impassioned admirer. It is desirable, 
however, that we should get rid of all these disturbing in- 
fluences — of the bitterness of conquered and exiled Claren- 
don, on the one hand, of the all-applauding enthusiasm of 
Carlyle, on the other — and that, without any theory to ad- 
vance or any passion to gratify, we should endeavor to do 
justice, strict justice, to a man, to whom, as to all other men, 
justice and truth are due, and who ought to be impartially 
and accurately estimated, because he is far from being the 
last of his class. It requires no prophet to foresee that in our 



cwn or the next generation, other Crora wells will rise up in 
Europe, perhaps in America ; and it is well to investigate, 
beforehand, the circumstances which produce them, and the 
different phases of character through which they pass. 

That Oliver Cromwell, then, was a great man, must be ac- 
knowledged, his enemies themselves being judges. Claren- 
don's sentence on him is worth giving, not only because it is 
the judgment of one great man by another — his contempo- 
rary, his associate and his enemy — but also because it is a 
striking instance of that singular power of individualizing the 
figures of history ; of painting a man by words, so that no 
canvass of Yandyke or Titian shall be more characteristic or 
better remembered ; a power which Clarendon possessed be- 
yond any historian of ancient or modern times, except per- 
haps Tacitus. 

Look, then, here at the original picture, from which all the 
engravings, so to speak, of Cromwell have been taken — all 
the representations which have been popularly accredited in' 
histories, pamphlets, essays and the like: — " He was," says 
Clarendon, "one of those men whom their very enemies can- 
not revile, without at the same time praising ; for he never 
could have done half that mischief without great parts, 
courage, industry and judgment. lie must have had a won- 
derful understanding in the natures and humors of men, and 
as great address in applying them, who, from a private and 
obscure birth, (though of a good family,*) without interest or 
estate, alliance or friendship, could raise himself to such a 
height, and compound and knead such opposite and con- 
tradictory tempers, humors and interests into a consistence 
that contributed to his designs and to their destruction, whilst 
himself grew insensibly powerful enough to cut off those by 
whom he climbed, in the instant that they projected to de- 
molish their own building. What Yellerius Paterculus said 
of Cinna, may very justly be said of him : that he dared 
what no good man would have dared, and that he accom- 
plished what none but the bravest could have accomplished. 
"Without doubt, no man with more wickedness ever at- 
tempted anything, or brought to pass what he desired more 

* Cromwell was a cousin, though a far-off one, of Charles I. himself— his mother 
having been a Stewart, desceuded from the royal family of Scotland. 



•wickedly — more in the face and contempt of religion and 
moral honesty ; yet, wickedness as great as his could never 
have accomplished those trophies without the assistance of a 
great spirit and admirable circumspection and sagacity, and 
a most magnanimous resolution. 

" When he appeared first in the Parliament, he seemed to 
have a person in no degree gracious; no ornament of dis- 
course ; none of those talents which used to reconcile the af- 
fections of the stander-by : yet, as he grew into place and 
authority, his parts seemed to be raised, as if he had conceal- 
ed faculties until he had occasion to use them ; and when he 
was to act the part of a great man, he did it without any in- 
decency, notwithstanding the want of custom. After he was 
confirmed and invested Protector, by the humble petition 
and advice, he consulted with very few upon any occasion of 
importance, nor communicated any enterprize he resolved 
upon, with more than those who were to have principal parts 
in the execution of it, nor with them sooner than was abso- 
lutely necessary. "What he once resolved, Jii which he was 
not rash, he would not be dissuaded from, nor endure any 
contradiction of his power and authority, but extorted obedi- 
ence from them who were not willing to yield it." Claren- 
don then mentions an instance, in which he imprisoned a 
man who refused to pay a tax that he had laid upon the city : 
and when Maynard, an eminent lawyer," of counsel for the 
prisoner, demanded of the Court of King's Bench to set him 
at liberty, because of the illegality of the imprisonment, the 
Protector sent Maynard himself to the Tower, and severely 
rebuked the judges for entertaining the question — demanding 
-of them, who made them judge's, or whether they had any 
authority to sit there but what he gave them ? and dismissed 
them with the caution, that they should not suffer the law- 
yers to prate what it would not become them to hear. Thus 
he subdued a spirit that had been often troublesome to the 
most sovereign power, and made "Westminster Hall as obedi- 
ent and subservient to his commands, as any of the rest of his 
quarters. In all other matters which did not concern the 
life of his jurisdiction, he seemed to have great reverence for 
the law — rarely interposing between party and party. 

As he proceeded with this kind of indignation and Iiaugliti- 



ness with those who were refractory and dared to contend 
with his greatness, so towards all those who complied with 
his good pleasure and courted his protection, he used a 
wonderful civility, generosity and honesty. 

To reduce three • nations which perfectly hated him to an 
entire oLedience to' his dictates ; to awe and govern those 
nations by an army that was undevoted to him and wished 
his ruin, was an instance of a very prodigious address. But 
his greatness at home was but a shadow of the glory he had 
abroad. It was hard to discover which feared him most — 
France, Spain or the Low Countries — where his friendship 
was current at the value he himself put upon it. As they 
did all sacrifice their honor and their interest to his pleasure, 
so there was nothing which he could have demanded that 
either of them would have denied him. To manifest which, 
two instances are given by Clarendon. One is that so well 
known, of the "Waldenses, whose prince, the Duke of Savoy, 
had determined upon their extirpation. These, "whose 
moans the vales*redoubled to the hills, and they to Heaven," 
touched the heart of Cromwell with pity and with indigna- 
tion. He sent an agent at once to the Duke of Savoy — a 
prince with whom he had no correspondence nor commerce — 
to demand a cessation of the persecution ; and so engaged 
Cardinal Mozaine, and even terrified the Pope himself — be- 
ing accustomed to say that his ships should visit Civita Yec- 
chia, and the sound of his cannon be heard in Rome — that 
the Duke of Savoy restored to his protestant subjects all he 
had taken from them, and renewed their privileges that they 
had forleited. In the other instance, his authority was yet 
greater and more incredible. The Protestants in the city of 
jSasmes, in France, on occasion of a disputed election, had, 
without warning, fired upon the dignataries of the Roman 
Catholic Church and the magistrates of the town, and killed 
several of them. The French Court was glad of this outrage, 
as it was thereby furnished with a justification for what it 
wished to do — that is, strike a heavy blow against the reform- 
ed religion in that country — meaning to put to death a num- 
ber of their leaders, pull down their churches in that city, and 
expel many from their homes. The rioters submitted them- 
selves to the magistrates, but they could not obtain even a 



promise of mercy. In this extremity they sent to Cromwell 
for protection ; and their messenger made the utmost haste. 
Cromwell having heard his account, told him to refresh him- 
self after so long a journey, and that he would take such care 
of his business, that by the time he reached Paris on his re- 
turn, he would find it dispatched. And this was verified : 
for when the messenger came to Paris, he found that an or- 
der had already been given to stop the troops which were on 
their march to the offending city ; and in a few days a full par- 
don and amnesty were given under the great seal of France. 
He never suffered Cardinal Mozaine to deny him anything : 
and the poor man complained that he knew not how to be- 
have himself; for if he undertook to punish the Protestants, 
Cromwell threatened him ; and if he showed them favor, he 
was accounted at Pome a heretic. 

With all this force of character, he was not a man of blood. 
Constant efforts were made to assassinate him ; and he was 
importuned by his officers to permit a general massacre of 
the Royal party, but he would never consent. In short, says 
Clarendon, somewhat inconsistently, after such a recital, " as 
he had all the wickedness against which damnation is de- 
nounced and for which hell-fire is prepared, so he had some 
virtues which have caused the memory of some men in all 
ages to be celebrated, and he will be looked on by posterity 
as a brave bad man." This, then, was beyond all question a 
great man. Out of the mouth of the enemies who hated him 
most, we have the strongest testimony. 

He was no braggart like Cleon, no declaimer like Robes- 
pierre ; but a man of admirable sagacity, of the clearest in- 
sight into human nature and personal character, of the sound- 
est judgment, and a courage so unblenching, a resolution so 
magnanimous, that, in this respect, none of Plutarch's heroes, 
no knight in the most brilliant age of chivalry, has ever ex- 
celled him. He was, says one of the contemporaries, a strong 
man. In the dark perils of war, in the high places of the 
field, hope shone in him like a pillar of fire, when it had 
gone out in all others. But great men have their gradations. 
There are those who tower above their competitors, as Mont 
Blanc lifts itself above the other Alpine heights. There are 
a few whose names we instinctively recall when we think of 



10 

transcendent ability. They are such as Alexander, as Caesar, 
as Napoleon. No man thinks of putting them on the same 
level with ordinary conquerors or statesmen. Beasidas was 
a great man, but he was not Alexander ; Scipio was a great 
man, but he was not Caesar ; Key and Massena were great 
men, but they were fit only to be the marshals of Napoleon. 
And this, I think, will be seen to be a characteristic of these 
stars of the first magnitude, that their light shines on the 
whole sphere of human thought. It is not this or that work 
which they are competent to do ; but whatever it be that is 
most difficult to man, and yet possible, these men show them- 
selves competent to effect, when the occasion presents itself. 
Think, e. g., of Alexander — of that man dying before he was 
thirty-two, yet, having not only won the most marvellous 
victories that history records, but effected conquests as dura- 
ble as they were extensive — yet finding time to master the 
philosophy and literature of Greece ; and while borne along 
in the whirlwind of victory, still capable of discerning, with 
the prophetic eye of genius, the spot best suited to establish 
a city worthy to bear his name — a city whose position was 
selected with such wisdom that no revolution could overthrow 
it, no extremity of war, no vicissitudes of commerce, no 
changes of dynasty, no successions of religion, no extirpa- 
tions even of races of men have prevented it from continu- 
ing, for more than 2,000 years, one of the leading cities of the 
world. Till his day, Greece was a corner of Europe ; after 
his clay, Greece overspread the world — in its language, its 
literature, its colonies, its kingdoms, its moral and even its 
political ascendency. 

The intellect of Alexander, then, was wide and various like 
the empire he established. Still more certain is this of Julius 
Caesar, the greatest perhaps of all men. His deeds in war 
were but a small part of his achievements. He was an ora- 
tor whom only want of time prevented from excelling 
Cicero : he was a writer, whose mere notes of his campaigns 
are among the most valued monuments of history ; he was 
the reformer of the Calendar, and for 1,600 years it remained 
as he had settled it. The penetration which belongs to su- 
perior genius ; its insight into character, not only where indi- 



11 

viduals are the objects of observation, but whole races of 
men ; its power to seize on what is durable and distinctive, 
passing by what is ephemeral or what is common to all men — 
these prerogatives of great souls are strikingly indicated in 
some remarks which Cassar casually throws out, that seem, 
also, in a very memorable way, to illustrate the permanence 
of national types of character. In speaking of the Gauls, 
the ancestors of the modern French, he mentions that he 
would not communicate to them certain plans of great im- 
portance which he was revolving, because of their fickleness 
and impressibility of nature. " For," he goes on to say, " that 
it was their custom to stop travelers on the road, however re- 
luctant these might be to be detained, and require them to 
tell all the news they had heard ; and that the populace in 
the towns would gather around merchants from abroad, and 
compel information from them of the countries from which 
they came, and of whatever was memorable or interesting 
that was known in those distant lands. 

" At the same time they were easily swayed by the rumors 
which thus reached them, and, on the strength of such intel- 
ligence, entered on the most important designs, which they 
would afterwards find it necessary to retrace up to their very 
first steps, because they had been acting in conformity with 
false information, which had been given them in response 
rather to their wishes than to the facts of the case." 

Could a more vivid picture be drawn of modern France — 
especially of that Paris which concentrates in itself not 
merely the powers and impulses, but all the distinctive pecu- 
liarities of France ? The impressionable, sympathetic, impetu- 
ous, inconstant, daring, cruel, frivilous, licentious, generous, 
faithless, inquisitive, intellectual Gaul whom we meet with 
on the page of Csesar — that medley of great faults and great 
excellencies — is the Frenchman of the League, of the Fronde, 
of the Re volution. What an eagle eye was that which sees all 
these things while he is marching at the head of his legions 
from one battle-field to another ; what a genius, which grasps 
every subject, the sublimest, the most trivial ; what quick- 
ness, which enables him to dictate to his secretaries seven let- 
ters at a time, on the most important subjects, shaking Eome 



12 

from the extremity of Belgium, and in ten years subduing 
Gaul, the Ehine and the Ocean of the North ? 

Alike in transcendent genius, but scarcely equal, was Na- 
poleon. It is not his marvellous success in war that places 
him in this grade, it is the universality of his powers ; it is 
not Lodi, nor Marengo, nor the Pyramids, nor Austerlitz 
alone ; but that Code Napoleon, so wise and just, and so 
adapted to the wants of men that it has survived him and his 
Empire, and by it he still rules among his enemies; it is that 
eloquence by which he spoke to the hearts of his soldiers, 
and stirred them as by the sound of a trumpet ; it is that pro- 
phetic power by which he announced, nearly forty years ago, 
the present war in Europe, the life and death struggle be- 
tween the Republican and the Cossack — for such in essence 
it is. It is wonderful that such a man as either Csesar or Na- 
poleon should be born in any country ; but how much more 
wonderful that one country should produce, even with an in- 
terval of eighteen centuries, these, in point of genius, the 
two foremost men of all the earth. 

Nothing, it would seem, but the most perverse love of 
paradox could induce one to imagine that Oliver Cromwell 
was the superior of these prodigies of intellect. As a war- 
rior, he never lost a battle ; as a statesman, he controlled the 
diplomacy of Europe, and he died in his own palace — not in 
exile, like Napoleon, not under the hand of assassins, like 
Cresar — but with every enemy prostrate, and leaving his 
mere name such a terror to men, that no one dared to stir or 
lift his hand against a single disposition he had made for six 
months after his bones were laid in the earth. And it is this 
success which seems to have fascinated Carlyle, who looks on 
might and right as equivalent, and has much more faith in 
trial by battle than by jury, or parliament, or ballot box, or 
any other human means. His God is, in a sense rather differ- 
ent from that of the Hebrews, the God of Hosts. But, after 
all, how far did Cromwell triumph ? He established no dy- 
nasty as Csesar did, and as perhaps even Napoleon indirectly 
has done. He could not even frame a government that would 
work. He called parliament after parliament, and after a 
few weeks was obliged to dissolve each one, his object frus- 
trated. The edifice of his personal power and fortunes fell 



13 

immediately after him. And we may well ask, what endur- 
ing monument of any sort did he leave ? There was no im- 
provement in the constitution of his country of which he can 
"be said to have been the author. lie found English law in a 
transition state, between feudality and the modern commer- 
cial equitable system ; he found it confused, incoherent, dila- 
tory, and he left it so. There is no Cromwcllian Code to ri- 
val the Code Napoleon, nor indeed any notable improvement, 
such as was actually wrought afterwards by inferior men in 
Charles II. 's day. Science and literature, though like other 
great men he honored them and wished them well, yet re- 
ceived no substantial, practical benefit from him. English 
architecture received nothing from him but injuries. He 
reared no monument in stone or marble to the nation's great- 
ness or his own glory ; but he permitted some of the noblest 
which England possessed to be mutilated, which he never 
restored. These were the castles, and above all, those ancient 
and magnificent cathedrals, the most precious heir-loom of 
all the national treasures that modern England has derived 
from the ancestral race, but which to Cromwell's soldiers 
were doubly odious, as refuges for their enemies, and as sym- 
bols of a faith which they abhorred. The cathedral at Car- 
lisle is, as I saw it a few years since, not yet restored from the 
ruin brought on it by the wanton violence of a time when, 

" Priests were from their Altars thrust, 
And Temples levelled to the dust, 
And solemn rites, and awful forms, 
Foundered amid fanatic storms !" 

Others suffered irreparable damage, but scarcely any so much 
as that of Carlisle. For this vandalism, Cromwell must in a 
great degree be held responsible, as the leading man of the 
party which perpetrated it, and as having possessed, and yet 
never exercised, the power to repair its consequences. In- 
deed, except music, of which he was passionately fond, he 
seems to have felt and cherished a thoroughly puritanical 
contempt and repugnance for all the fine arts. 

In this respect, as in many others, how unworthy is he to 
be compared with those myriad-minded men, who knew not 
only how to fight and how to treat, but how to adorn life — 






14 

how to address the souls of their fellow-men for centuries, 
through solemn and august works which strike upon the im- 
agination and the heart through the senses. Such were the 
temples and amphitheatres that Csesar planned. Such were 
the columns and arches and public edifices that Napoleon 
constructed. How inferior, too, was he to these men in rich- 
ness and brilliancy of mind ? His oratory was impressive, 
from his entrance into the House of Commons, because he 
always spoke with great good sense, and with fiery earnest- 
ness ; but it is uncouth, prolix, involved, and to a reader even 
wearisome, having scarcely a gleam in thought or language 
of that lightning power of genius by which Caesar and Na- 
poleon transfixed the hearts of men. And often all the 
greatness of Cromwell, in his own departments, war and gov- 
vernment, though real and intrinsic, has appeared much more 
striking, because of the mediocrity of most of those by whom 
he was surrounded. 

Fairfax was the only one of the parliamentary Generals, 
besides Cromwell himself, who seems to have had much tal- 
ent; and he lacked energy and decision; while of the Roy- 
alists, Prince Rupert did as much to ruin his uncle's cause, 
as if he had been bribed by his enemies; while Ormond 
and Capell and Hapton and Astley, were merely sensible, gal- 
lant gentlemen. Had Montrose,, indeed, instead of leading a 
few wild Highlanders, been at the head of an army like that 
which fought on the king's side at Marston Moor or Naseby, 
and the issue been the same, then it would have been impos- 
sible to deny that his conqueror was one of the greatest cap- 
tains the world has ever seen. As it is, we only know that 
no equal ever faced him. He was not less fortunate in the 
period when he began to interfere in the affairs of the conti- 
nent. The Thirty Years' War was just closed, and Germany 
lay faint and bleeding from innumerable wounds. Spain, 
paralyzed by her Church and by her government, forbidden 
by the Inquisition to think, and thereby losing the very pow- 
er of thought, stript of her former political liberties, ruled by 
kings so weak and incapable that they were notoriously under 
subjection to favorites scarcely superior in mind and energy 
to themselves — Spain was rapidly sinking to its present state 
of helplessness and degradation, and presented its unwieldy 



15 

bulk to an active assailant, as the whale rolls before the har- 
pooner, with a vast surface to wound, with immense riches to 
spoil, and with no skill or power of defence to repel. France, 
on the other hand, was full of youthful vigor ; but fortunately 
for Cromwell's ascendency, Kichelieu was dead, Louis XIV. 
was a minor. It was in the interregnum between those two 
great rulers, that he carried matters with so high a hand over 
that proud country. Cardinal Mozaine, a cunning, timid 
man, and doubly hateful to the nation he governed, as not 
only a foreigner, but an Italian, a countryman of Catherine 
DeMedicis, was then at the helm. The country was, indeed, 
in a most confused state. The great nobles levied war 
against the king, or fought for him, apparently to pass away 
the time — changing sides in a moment of pique or ill humor 
with their associates, or to gain a smile from their mistresses. 
To a country in this state of disorder, with a ruler constitu- 
tionally fearful, Cromwell, with his sagacity, resolution and 
military fame, had to address himself. ~No wonder that he 
spoke only to be obeyed. His reclamations in behalf of the 
Protestants would not have been listened to so meekly thirty 
years before, when Richelieu was besieging Rochelle, nor 
thirty years after, when Louis XIV. was revoking the Edict 
of ISTantz. He bestrode the world like a collossus, because 
the men around him were pigmies. On the whole, when we 
examine what he did, we find that his genius was rather 
destructive than constructive. He pulled down the throne, 
but he could not build another, nor could he set up a repub- 
lic ; he pulled down first Episcopacy and then Presbyterian- 
ism, but he had nothing definite to offer the nation in their 
stead. He gained no permanent conqust for his country but 
Jamaica, and that rather by accident than of purpose ; he 
made no improvement in her economical or social interests ; 
and, except the halo of reputation which he shed around her 
name by his victories on land, and by Blake's at sea, his 
work for all good purposes died with him. "What good he 
frustrated of course no man can tell. It is certainly possible 
that but for him, there might have been an agreement be- 
tween the king and people ; that the Church might have been 
upheld ; that society might have escaped the absolute domi- 
nation of the Puritans, and the consequent reaction, the dis- 



16 

soluteness and profligacy of the Restoration. Looking at the 
issue of his work, Cromwell cannot be considered even as 
a successful man ; and though undoubtedly great, he cannot 
be ranked with those mighty minds who have regulated the 
course of history, and the fortunes of their entire race, and 
left an indelible impress on the institutions and even the 
character of mankind. He must be relegated to that se- 
condary, though still very high rank to which we assign the 
Marlboroughs and the Wellingtons, the Henry TV. of France 
and the Frederick H. of Prussia — men renowned for prowess 
in the field and wisdom in the Cabinet, but yet mere war- 
riors and statesmen, not those bright universal intelligences, 
who are competent to win the prize in any arena of human 
effort. And some such estimate of Cromwell's intellectual 
proportions even his enemies were obliged to allow the jus- 
tice of. Self-respect would compel this, for he had conquered 
them all, and they would scarcely desire to have it thought 
that their superior was either a coward or a fool. The par- 
ticular in which they seem to me to have been least just to 
him, is in the moral aspect of his character. I have already 
quoted the language of Clarendon, that Cromwell had all the 
wickedness against which damnation is denounced, and for 
which hell-fire is prepared; and Lingard says "his whole 
life was made of artifice and deceit," and yet these two are 
among the calmest of the historians opposed to him. A great 
and very favorable light has however been shed on his char- 
acter, since these authors wrote, by the publication of his let- 
ters and speeches. In these he speaks for himself, and we 
see not only his penetration and sagacity, his calm fortitude 
when the day is darkest and the storm heaviest, and all the 
other lofty elements of character, but we see the gentleness 
almost of a woman in his intercourse with those he loves ; 
great consideration for the helpless ; warm domestic affections, 
and other sweet and gracious elements of character, soften- 
ing and adorning the stern bold man, like flowers blooming 
on an Alpine cliff. The great question, however, concerning 
his moral nature, (for a robber may be kind to his wife and 
loving to his children,) the point on which our whole esti- 
mate of his character must depend, is this, was he sincere in 
his professions of patriotism and religion ? These professions 



17 

Were sufficiently loud and obtrusive. Were they the uncon* 
trolable expression of genuine feeling, or were they the ut- 
terances merely of a remorseless craft and hypocrisy? It 
would be very easy to pronounce peremptorily either way, 
and to oifer well authenticated facts in confirmation of either 
■view. But this short, unqualified way of deciding on char- 
acter, does not suit the complexity of human nature, and 
least of all men would it suit the case of Oliver Cromwell — a 
man of large experience of life, deeply affecting his original 
elements of character, and who, even in these elements was 
various, and so to speak, many-sided. The basis of the man's 
moral nature, I suppose to have been a profound melancholy. 
He shared this temperament with some other men who have 
most affected the fortunes of the world— with Mahomet, with 
Martin 'Luther, with Dr. Johnson, with some of the ancient 
.prophets, with some of the old saints. This temperament, 
inclining men to look with scorn and indifference on the or- 
dinary objects of human pursuit, renders them more single*- 
^minded, more energetic, and more uncontrollable in effect- 
ing the objects they actually take to heart. How can you 
alarm a man to whom life itself is a weariness, to whom all 
things appear -flat, stale, and unprofitable? Hero, then, is a 
•basis for magnanimity. And at the same time, how can you 
bribe a man, who sets no value on any thing you have to 
•offer? This melancholy temperament, then, is allied to sin- 
cerity. But there is a class of thoughts and interests, which, 
if they be considered, 'cannot be despised. They are those 
which relate to the soul, to God, and to eternity. If we an- 
alyze earthly things, they cannot bear it, they shrink away, 
they become as nothing. But the deeper we search into, and! 
>the longer we contemplate those which are eternal, the mone* 
;grand and vast do they loom before the mind's eye. T^ere , 
is, then, a natural affinity between a thoughtful melancholy 
temperament and religious sensibility and earnestness. The 
tendency may be suppressed by intellectual convictions unfa- 
vorable to it, as for example, in an infidel age ;. and where . 
the tendency is not checked, the religion may be true or may, 
be false, to which it is directed ; but, independently of these 
considerations, it is manifest, on psychological grounds, that 
strong and deep religious impressions are easily made on men 
2 "~ ■*' • 



18 

of melancholy temperament, and the incidents of history 
strikingly confirm the conclusion which would itself flow from 
a priori reasoning. Mahomet was such a man. He who sup- 
poses him to have been a mere vulgar mercenary impostor, 
like Theudos of old, or Joe Smith in our own day, does great- 
ly err. There is every reason to believe that he began with 
the earnest purpose to be what was much needed at that 
time, a religious reformer ; and it is very probable that he- 
was persuaded that God had sent him to do that work. It 
was not begun till he was past middle age, and had become a 
man of wealth and social consideration. 

The career on which he entered was difficult and danger- 
ous, and of most uncertain issue. He had much to lose, and 
but little to gain, when he arrayed himself against the super- 
stitions and idolatries of his people. No man can reasonably 
explain his conduct but through sincere religious zeal. But 
the point to which I wish to direct especial attention is this, 
that he was one of those men who are constitutionally grave 
and ever sad ; that he was indifferent to what most men 
value, and given to extreme and protracted meditation on 
those great problems which our spiritual nature and eternal 
destiny suggest. He was, from his youth up, a silent, serious 
man, inquisitive as to those subjects which bear on the iuture 
life. 

At twelve years of age he came under the instruction of a 
Nestorian monk, who is supposed to have done much to shape 
the system of doctrine which he subsequently taught. When 
he had acquired wealth by his maraiage with Cadijah, he 
neglected his former commercial occupations, and gave him- 
self up, to a great extent, to meditation and prayer. The 
babble of the Arabs about camels and caravans, and silks and 
spices, and wars and forays, could not interest a soul burning 
with desire to know itself and its destines, whence it came, 
whither it went, what its nature. To such a soul, dwelling 
on thoughts of sin, and holiness, and God, and eternity, the 
worship and faith of those around him, worship of the black 
stone at Mecca and of graven images, faith in a multipli- 
city of gods, and in stars as gods, and in images as divine ; 
all this seemed as a blasphemous deceit and horrible impiety. 



19 

Thus lie gradually absented himself from society, and, seek- 
ing solitude in a cavern, would remain days and nights to- 
gether wrapt in meditation and prayer. There he saw visions 
and dreamed dreams. There it was revealed to him that 
there was but one God, and that resignation to His will, was 
the great, all-comprehensive duty of man. There, it w T as im- 
pressed on his mind, that he was called to go forth and teach 
others what he had himself, after many painful struggles and 
anxious thoughts of soul, thus learned. At first, it seems he 
was doubtful of his own mission, and needed to be confirmed 
by the assurance of his wife and his friends, that he was in- 
deed the prophet of God. I suppose, then, that his original 
motives were good ; that his first steps were taken in all sin- 
cerity, and that his religion, in its primary annunciation, was a 
great improvement on the low idolatry scarcely above Fetich- 
ism of his day and country. That all this was, in the 
course of time, changed very much for the worse ; that in a 
certain sense, that is true which is often said of him, that he 
began a fanatic and ended a hypocrite ; that he became infu- 
riated by the opposition he met with ; that he was debased 
by his struggles, and by his very success ; that he gradually 
imbibed the spirit of a warrior, a conqueror, and a sensual- 
ist ; and that at length he feigned revelations to justify his 
own character and practices — all this seems to me indubita- 
bly certain. But such are the weaknesses and inconsisten- 
cies of human nature, that all this is not irreconcilable with 
the belief that he was originally sincere and earnest in his 
religious aspirations ; and I urge this to show the connection 
that exists between deep religious sensibility, and that mys- 
terious temperament, lofty, melancholy, ascetic, which he 
shared with Cromwell and many more of the master-spirits 
of mankind. 

Martin Luther is another. In classing him, then, with 
these men, of course I do not mean to intimate that he was 
like them in all respects ; not more pure, not more devout. 
He was, in these respects, I am greatly persuaded, their su- 
perior; but he was like them in a melancholy which ap- 
proached almost to madness, and in a depth of religious feel- 
ing which made him count all the bribes and all the terrors 



20 

of the world but as the small dust of the balance, compared 
with the duty of holding and maintaining and propagating 
his convictions. Luther, it has been well remarked, had a 
mind intently self-contemplative and profoundly unquiet, 
which, except the strongest active occupations diverted it, 
preyed on itself — scrutinized its own faith, feelings, fears and 
hopes — pried into the mysteries of its own nature, and pro- 
voked internal dissatisfactions and struggles. He speaks of 
his great scenes of trial, as being throughout life, internal. 
His agonies, his temptations, his colloquies with himself or 
with Satan, the tenderest controversy, and the most formida- 
ble disputant were always within him. He fasted, prayed, 
watched long and vigorously. Often, when a monk, on re- 
turning to his cell, he knelt at the foot of the bed, and re- 
mained there until day-break. He relates that once, for a 
whole fortnight, he neither ate, drank, nor slept. At the 
foot of the altar, his hands clasped, his eyes full of tears, he 
prayed for peace and found none. One morning, the door of 
his cell not being open as usual, the brethren became alarm- 
ed — they knocked, and there was no reply. The door was 
burst in, and brother Martin was found stretched on the 
ground, in a state of ecstacy, scarcely breathing, and well 
nigh dead. Is it not easy to trace the coincidence between 
these struggles and those of Mahomet in his cave, and of 
Cromwell, as Carlyle vividly describes him, " walking with a 
heavy foot-fall and many thoughts by the bank of the dark 
and slumberous Ouse, with thoughts not bounded by that river, 
with thoughts that went beyond eternity, and a great black 
sea of things that he had never been able to think. 91 May 
we not trace these same struggles in all men of whom we 
know any thing, of active minds, and at the same time of 
this melancholy temperament, in Pascal, in Dante, in Cow- 
per, in Dr. Johnson — " fits of the blackness of darkness, with 
glances of the brightness of very Heaven"." 

But these struggles do not belong only to men of this class, 
who do come to some solution, more or less just, more or less 
satisfactory, of the problems with which they are perplexed, 
concerning the soul, and God and eternity ; they belong also 
to those to whom these problems remain forever insoluble, 



21 

and who sink into unbelief and Atheism. They have been 
traced for us in saddest but clearest light, by the pens of 
Rousseau and Byron and Shelley, men who yearned for knowl- 
edge and peace, and madly rejecting that which came to 
them from Heaven, plunged into atheistic despair. The 
great bulk- of mankind know but little of these trials; they 
indeed feel difficulties, for that is inevitable, but they are 
not much troubled by them, and they readily accept of any 
proffered solution, and become content. But there is a class 
of minds naturally disdainful of the petty objects of life, 
meditative, inquisitive concerning the future, reverential, 
scrupulous, sometimes morbidly scrupulous, to whom life is a 
burden, until they obtain some satisfaction to their question- 
ings concerning God, good and evil, the soul and eternity. 
Such a man was Cromwell. In early life he suffered, they 
say, from hypochondria. His physician told Sir Philip War- 
wick that he had often been sent for to him at midnight ; that 
he often thought he was just about to die, and had fancies 
about the Town-Cross. We are reminded of Luther throw- 
ing his inkstand at Satan, whom he believed to be bodily pre- 
sent with him — of Dr. Johnson, after his mother's death, 
hearing her call him — and of other indications of the per- 
turbed state of powerful souls wrestling with difficulties and 
temptations. These dark sorrows and melancholies of Crom- 
well, are valuable as indications of his character. We know 
better to what order of men to assign him ; and it is any 
thing but a low or base order. As his admiring biographer 
says, the quantity of sorrow a man has, does it not mean 
withal the quantity of sympathy he has, the quantity of 
faculty and victory he shall yet have ? " Our sorrow is the 
inverted image of our nobleness." The depth of our despair, 
measures what capability and weight of claim we have to 
hope. Black smoke of Tophet tilling all your universe, it yet 
can, by true heart-energy, become flame and brilliancy of 
heaven. At length his soul found rest in the disclosures and 
consolations of religion, and never afterwards was he so 
troubled by melancholy imaginations. Indeed, the civil war 
soon broke out, and his active spirit was drawn away from its 
own internal conflicts to the embodied tumults that raged 



22 

around him, and amid the din of battle and the excitement 
of diplomacy, while guiding with a strong hand the car of 
state, and crushing with relentless energy the machinations 
of enemies, he had no time to bestow on the dark visions of 
early life. Yet indications of the same temperament we find 
coming to the surface throughout all his days, and among 
those indications, I number his coarse and unseasonable jokes. 
As opposite colors are said by modern science to be compli- 
mentary, one of another, and as magnetism has its oppo- 
site poles, so a given quality of character will show itself by 
two opposite classes of manifestations. Fear is not only cau- 
tious, but it is rash. Prodigality is parsimonious as well as 
profuse, and thus melancholy, while it'cannot be cheerful, is 
both merry and sad. Never perhaps was there a great jester 
who did not often suffer from deep depression. "Where there 
is such violent action, there must be corresponding reaction. 
Thus the two gravest of modern nations, the Spaniards and 
the English, have most humor. Shakspeare, with his accus- 
tomed intimate knowledge of human nature, introduces Fal- 
staff complaining of melancholy. And the actual humorists, 
Sterne and Swift, were any thing but happy men ; while 
the solemn Johnson would burst out occasionally into uncon- 
trollable tits of laughter, and Luther's jests are as pungent as 
his invectives, and his wit scarcely less famous than his elo- 
quence. 

It is thus we are to understand Cromwell's coarse and un- 
seasonable jocularity. It was repeatedly exhibited when 
events were gravest, and his own feelings ought to have been 
the saddest. Thus when he signed the order for the kind's 
execution, he smeared with ink Henry Martyr's face, who sat 
by him, and who immediately did the same to him. Was 
this exuberance of spirits in the very doing so dreadful a 
deed ? Surely not. It was the very tension of his nervous 
system which thus sought relief. He gave vent to his deep 
emotions in buffoonry, because he could not suppress them ; 
and to utter them in suitable word or deed would have been 
discouraging to his followers, already anxious and shrinking 
from the consequences of their own solemnly pronounced 
judgment. On another occasion, he ends an interview with 



23 

Ludlow, by throwing a cushion at his head and running down 
stairs — not a very seemly and dignified proceeding on the 
part of so great a man, but done probably in order to avoid 
breaking out into that torrent of passion and invective which 
Ludlow's unyielding opposition was likely to urge him to. 
On the whole, if I have justly estimated Cromwell, he be- 
longed by original constitution and natural temperament, to 
a class of men who, of necessity, are in earnest in wh#t they 
undertake, who are not cheerful and happy in their or- 
ganization, who look on the mysteries of the universe with a 
sad and unquiet eye, who are much occupied with these prob- 
lems, who are not much attracted by the toys and gewgaws 
of life, who do not live for bread alone, but for the truth 
which they have painfully discovered, or suppose themselves 
to have discovered, and for the right, which they desire to see 
established. 

Such men must be in earnest. It is not among them that 
you find the quacks and impostors of the world, those who 
cheat their fellow-men for a morsel of bread. Cromwell 
went forth to do his work, sternly earnest, believing he was 
called thereto by God ; believing that God would own him, 
and prosper his work. He had much to surrender even to 
set out on his career. He was past forty years of age when 
the Long Parliament began to sit — a time of life when men 
think of rest rather than of untried and arduous fields of la- 
bor. He had a family which he loved with an intensity of 
affection which none but strong natures like his can feel. 
The shot which killed one of his children, young Oliver, who 
fell in a skirmish with the Scots in 1648, almost slew his fa- 
ther likewise. Ten years afterwards, not long before his last 
illness, hearing some one read these words from Phil. 4th eh.,, 
11th, 12th, 13th verses: — "Not that I speak in respect of 
want : for I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith 
to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know 
how to abound : every where, and in all things, I am in- 
structed, both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound 
and to sufi'er need. I can do all things through Christ which 
strengtheneth me," he said, " This scripture did once save 
nay- life, when my poor Oliver died, which went as a dagger 



24 

to my heart, indeed it did." The death of his favorite daugh- 
ter Elizabeth, Lady Claypole, which occurred not much more 
than a month before his own, no doubt insured and hastened 
the latter. A man who thus cherished his children, as an 
eagle her young, was not likely to expose the precious nest 
for any selfish object. He went forth to battle because he 
believed God and his country called him. And certainly 
there was much in the state of the country to justify that be- 
lief. 

Charles had been trained by his father in the principles of 
arbitrary government, and no doubt sincerely believed that 
he was responsible to God alone for any of his acts. His 
ministers, Buckingham and Strafford, were accustomed to ex- 
ercise their powers in the most haughty and oppressive way. 
The people, on the other hand, felt the impulse to freedom 
of thought and action which the reformation had imparted, 
and were conscious of increasing power resulting from rapid- 
ly growing wealth and knowledge. What the constitution 
really was, no one could certainly tell. There was none writ- 
ten, and there were precedents on both sides, of every dis- 
puted question. Perhaps a collision was inevitable. If im- 
plicit obedience were rendered to the king, the government 
would become a despotism like that of Spain or Russia. If 
on the other hand he yielded every point, the monarchy was 
at end. It is observable that in the beginning of the con- 
test, the opposition were so clearly in the right, that in the 
earlier part of the long parliament there was almost entire 
unanimity against the king, Lord Capel being the first to 
move a redress of grievances, and Clarendon and Falkland 
leading the party which assailed the court. It must be admit- 
ted also, that there was something to justify Cromwell's oppo- 
sition to the authority of the church as it was then exercised, 
for it was not exercised either mercifully or wisely. 

Archbishop Laud was a pure and devout man, inflexible in 
his maintenance of the truth as he held it, dying for the church 
like a martyr of its best ages ; but unhappily not only willing 
to suffer himself, but willing also to inflict suffering on others, 
and insisting not only on obedience to the faith in its essen- 
tials, but an acceptance of the ritual in its merest circum- 



25 

stantials. He was, in short, good and able in his way, but 
imperious and narrow-minded. He had not in his intellectual 
vision sufficient perspective. The little and the great were 
nearly equal in his view ; surplices and genuflexions werfe 
scarcely less precious in his eyes than creeds and command- 
ments. His face, as preserved to us in paintings and engrav- 
ings, has in it the lines of severity and obstinacy, and lacks 
the indications of an expansive understanding ; and there is 
in the correspondence which passed between him and Straf- 
ford an ominous repetition of a sort of signal-word which 
they used, i. e. Thorough. When such a man stood before 
Oalvanists, Presbyterians and Independents, representing 
Ritualism, Ecclesiasticism, Armenianism, and even strongly, 
however unjustly suspected of Romanism, we cannot wonder 
at the virulence with which they pursued him. 

It is idle, however, to talk of them as the champions of re- 
ligious liberty. They did not mean liberty for any but them- 
selves. They struggled for supremacy, the supremacy of 
their own system, which involved the casting down its rival. 
To accuse Cromwell, then, of hypocrisy and self-interested 
ends in the battle he fought for the Commonwealth and for 
Puritanism, is to bring a charge not only without evidence, 
but against evidence. "When this capital point of his sinceri- 
ty has been settled, there is, really, very little room left for 
difference of opinion as to his character. lie did many things 
that cannot be successfully defended, but nothing that was 
mean or base, and not many, probably, that his own con- 
science protested against at the time. He did massacre the 
English refugees and the native Irish at Droghecla and at 
Wexford, but lie justified these acts to the world and proba- 
bly to himself, on the ground that he thereby shortened the 
war, and prevented a still greater effusion of blood. He did 
expel the native Irish from their possessions, and compel 
them to settle in a narrow, remote, and barren part of the 
Island in Connaught ; but in doing this, he pursued the very 
policy which our government is following in its treatment of 
the Indians ; and his estimate of the wild Irish of his day, 
was not probably very different, perhaps scarcely so favorable, 
as that which is common with us of the Indians. He did, in 



26 

effect, kill the king, for by a crook of his finger he could 
have saved his life; but he probably justified this, not only 
on the alleged ground of the king's attempts on the lives and 
liberties of his people, but still more on the consideration that 
the civil war would never cease while the king lived. It is 
certain, that on the whole, he did not shed blood wantonly 
or wilfully. Pie saved the lives of many royalists who were 
in his power ; when threatened daily with assassination him- 
self, he would permit no attempt at the assassination of his 
enemies. This mercy was, in some degree, owing to his re- 
markable fearlessness. He refused his' consent to a plan to 
exterminate the Royalists, Clarendon says, from too much 
contempt of them. While not the equal of Napoleon in bril- 
liancy and grandeur of genius, how immeasurably is he his 
superior in magnanimity ! Napoleon, though almost canon- 
ized if not rather deified by a recent American writer, can- 
not be considered a magnanimous man. He murdered — to 
use the truest and most proper word — he murdered the Due 
D'Enghien, from the fear of being himself assassinated — a 
fear to which Alexander showed himself so superior, when he 
took the cup from the hand of his physician — a fear to which 
Cassar and Cromwell never yielded, though encompassed by 
far more real danger. Napoleon caused four thousand Turks 
who surrendered at Jaffa on the promise that their lives 
should be spared, to be shot down three days after the capitu- 
lation. The massacre at Drogheda is the darkest stain on the 
memory of Cromwell ; but how excusable, how honorable is 
it, compared with them assacre at Jaffa ! It was done in the 
heat of battle — no promise was broken, no capitulation vio- 
lated. The next day after the storming of the city two tow- 
ers were taken, from one of which some of his men had been 
fired at and killed, when it was certain that there could be 
no effectual resistance. Under these circumstances of great 
provocation, Cromwell contented himself with killing the of- 
ficers, decimating the men, and sending the survivors to be 
sold at Barbacloes. All these were acts no doubt of detesta- 
ble cruelty, and they have made the name of Cromwell to be 
a curse and horror to the present day in Ireland. But they 
were not unprecedented in the stern trade of war. A man 



27 

taken in arms having just tried to slay his conqueror, is un- 
derstood to be at his mercy. If he is spared, the greater is 
the glory of his victor; if he is put to death, he pays the for- 
feit of that cruel game he has been playing. But at Jaffa, 
Napoleon invades a country which had been at peace with 
his, until he and his army land on its shore. Pie takes a city, 
whose only crime is, that it is faithful to its duty. Four 
thousand gallant men are prepared to continue their defence. 
His own aid and stepson promises them that if they will lay 
down their arms, their lives shall be spared. But it is found 
that this will not be convenient. Food is scarce, and four 
thousand additional mouths will increase that scarcity. If 
these men are turned loose, they may join his enemies still in 
the field. For two days the matter is debated, at length it is 
determined they shall all be shot. They were marched in 
chains to the sea shore, and divided into small squares, and 
mowed down by successive discharges of musketry. For 
hours this was continued, and they who survived the shot 
were despatched with the bayonet. And yet it is certain 
that Napoleon did not love bloodshed for its own sake ; but 
he was supremely selfish, and he would break faith, and 
would trample out thousands of lives, not only to enhance 
his glory, in which he was like the other heroes in history, 
but to save himself from some additional cares and dangers, 
in which, to the honor of hiynan nature be it said, he was 
not like them. At that same Jaffa, (a name which must have 
rung in his ears whenever he thought of a judgment to come,) 
at that same Jaffa, on his return from Acre, where he had 
been repulsed, he is accused of having poisoned some of his 
own soldiers, to save them indeed from the cruelties of the 
Turks ; and in his conversations at St. Helena, without ex- 
pressly admitting the fact, he justifies it on the ground of 
mercy, and says he would have done so to his own son. But 
who, it may be asked, brought them into the power of the 
Turks? Who, by his previous massacre of his prisoners, had 
so infuriated the Turks, that they would show no mercy? 
Can any one imagine Cromwell poisoning his Iron Sides ; or 
CaBsar, pagan as he was, his Tenth Legion ? He withdrew 
from Egypt, leaving his army behind him, as soon as it be- 



23 

came certain that the expedition must ultimately fail. He 
left his perishing squadrons on the retreat from Russia, har- 
rassed by the enemy and sinking under the cold, and himself 
hastened back to Paris. ]S r o doubt his presence was required 
there, but was it not doubly required in the midst of men 
whose devotion to him was proving their ruin and their death ? 
In entire consistency with this, he was the first man to 
reach Paris with authentic accounts of his disaster at Water- 
loo. He was miles from the held of battle, when his Old 
Guard made the last effort to save the remnant of his army. 
It might have been the politic course, but it was hardly the 
magnanimous one. In his more personal and private rela- 
tions, he cast from him the wife of his youth and crushed the 
heart that loved him best on earth, to help forward the in- 
terests of his ill-starred ambition. Of all the men of whom 
history treats, there is perhaps no one, except Lord Bacon, 
who exhibits such a contrast between his intellectual gran- 
deur and his moral littleness. He was far from being the 
worst of men ; and he certainly was, in brilliancy and extent 
of genius, one of the very greatest : and, while exhibiting at 
Lodi and elsewhere, when he considered the occasion called 
for it, a courage worthy of the army he led, yet was he too 
selfish to be a hero of the first rank, even when measured by 
an entirely worldly standard. He could do kind and noble 
acts in the happiest manner, and accompanied by the most 
striking and appropriate language — for no one could make 
a phrase more brilliant than he ; but it is difficult to point 
out anything of this sort that he did, that cost him much. 
But, whatever his other faults might be, no one can bring 
charges of this sort against Cromwell. He never forsook a 
friend, still less a whole army imperilled in his cause. lie 
never left others to endure 'sufferings or to meet dangers 
from which he withdrew himself. He was no doubt ambi- 
tious ; but it is impossible not to see that it was not ambi- 
tion alone or principally that made him draw his sword in 
civil strife. Higher and nobler objects than anything that 
centered in himself alone, were in his mind's eye. He fought 
for the liberty, the happiness, and the glory of his country, 
and what he believed to be the truth of the gospel of his God. 



29 

No doubt lie wished to be the foremost man in England ; but 
much more did he wish England to be the foremost nation of 
the earth. On reading to his council a letter of Blake's, re- 
lating to the high manner in which the admiral had interpos- 
ed at Malaga to protect some Englishmen and to punish their 
assailants, 'Cromwell expressed the utmost approbation, and 
declared that by such means they would make the name of 
Englishman as great as that of Roman was in Home's most 
palmy days. But he felt an influence still more elevating, 
and. still more helpful to produce that self-forgetfulness in 
which magnanimity essentially consists. It was his religious 
fervor. I am not now inquiring into the purity or the com- 
pleteness of his creed. ISTo doubt in both respects it was faul- 
ty, but such as it was he believed it firmly. It was mainly in 
this respect that he was the superior of -Ccesar and Napoleon. 
It was the unhappy destiny of these two men to belong to a 
very irreligious age. They were born into a moral atmos- 
phere that was like the air of a room that has lost its oxygen 
— such as the Black Hole of Calcutta — and their whole moral 
nature was paralyzed, by it. Caesar lived when Paganism 
had become a laughingstock even to Pagans, and he seems to 
have had as little sense of religion as could be found in a 
man of such genius and general sensibility. He had, conse- 
quently, little or no moral principle. He did right some- 
times, and splendidly right, not because he felt it an obliga- 
tion, but because it was the impulse of his own noble nature. 
Napoleon reached manhood surrounded by those influences 
which culminated in the decrees of the French Convention, 
which pronounced the throne of heaven vacant, death an 
eternal sleep, and man, by consequence, to be only a superi- 
or sort of beast. Religion was to him, during the busy part 
of life, only a political engine, by which he worked on the 
feelings and purposes of men. He professed in Egypt to be 
a Mussulman, in the same spirit of calculation with which he 
afterwards made a concordat with the Pope. In the com- 
parative solitude and retirement of St. Helena, when life was 
waning away, his mind received a sounder and more health- 
ful tone ; and in his last days, the sacraments of the Romish 
church were administered to him at his own request: but 



30 

even then, he asked for them in an apologetical manner, and 
as if conscious that he lowered his position thereby. But 
with Cromwell, religion was a great reality. It was the high- 
est, the eternal relation of things. To be ashamed of it, was 
more foolish than to be ashamed of living or thinking. To 
him, God was an ever-present being. His providence it was 
that watched over him ; His decree the effectual cause of his 
victories. His conduct, to be sure, did not always corres- 
pond with these sentiments ; and when surrounded by the 
splendor of a court, and living in unaccustomed luxury, he 
relaxed, it is to be feared, very much from that strictness of 
morals, which had characterized the devout farmer of Hunt- 
ingdon. That jealousy, by which his wife was tormented af- 
ter he became Protector, seems to have been not without 
cause. And he must have felt that he had been guilty of 
many acts of military severity, of political intrigue, and of 
personal duplicity, which were wide deviations from that 
path of symplicity, sincerity, mercy and love in which his 
God had commanded him to walk. Cromwell, then, must be 
pronounced a hypocrite, if by hypocrisy is meant not act- 
ing up to a man's principles ; but alas ! who could abide thafe 
test? In that point of view, looking at poor humanity, we 
must say with the Psalmist in his haste, " All men are liars." 
But it may be said, that all religious men do not err to the 
extent and in the manner in which he erred. This is also 
true ; but it must be likewise remembered, that very few 
have been tempted as he was. He was no hypocrite in the 
sense of professing a faith he did not feel. He believed in 
the reality and necessity of divine grace, and that he had 
himself experienced it ; and this conviction he carried with 
him as a talisman in all the perils of his*subsequent course. 
And what thoughts does this imply of God, of a judgment, 
of the worth of the soul, of the effectual mediation of Christ ! 
How often must such thoughts have calmed and restrained 
that wild, great, vehement spirit, when its own tempestuous 
energies might have hurried it into deeper guilt than that by 
which it was actually stained ! What a safeguard then did 
he possess, as well as what a source of grandeur of thought 
and feeling of which Cseasar and Napoleon were bereft, by 



31 

tlie unhappy scepticism of their respective eras, in which 
they themselves participated. In the last period of life, by 
the mercy of God, occasion was given him to cherish these 
deep-rooted religious feelings, which had so often been smoth- 
ered and suppressed during his busy and eventful life, by the 
necessities, combinations and passions of the world — and 
grace, we may trust, was given him to improve the occasion. 
I have already spoken of the strength and vehemence of 
his paternal affection ; of all his children, Elizabeth, Lady 
Claypole, was the best beloved, and most attractive. She 
was, says G-uizot, a person of noble and delicate sentiments, 
of an elegant and cultivated mind, faithful to her friends, 
generous to her enemies, and tenderly attached to her father, 
of whom she felt at once proud and anxious, and who rejoiced 
greatly in her affection. When fatigued, as he often was, 
not only by the men who surrounded him, but by his own 
agitated thoughts, Cromwell took pleasure in seeking repose 
in the society of a person so entirely a stranger to the brutal 
conflicts and violent actions which had occupied, and still 
continued to occupy his life. She had for some time been an 
invalid, and in the summer of 1658 he sent her to Hampton 
court, that she might have the benefit of country air and 
complete tranquility. Finding her illness increase, he went 
to reside there himself, that he might watch over her with 
tender and constant care. Sitting by her side, he heard her 
give utterance, during attacks of delirium, sometimes to her 
own cruel sufferings, and sometimes to her grief and pious 
anxiety concerning himself. On the 6th of August she died, 
on the 24th he was himself ill ; then, as he advanced nearer 
to the grave, wordly thoughts and cares retreated and disap- 
peared, and the dread interests of eternity occupied his soul. 
He summoned the ministers of religion and other pious 
friends, who made earnest intercession that his life might be 
spared. His own prayers ascended with theirs, and the day 
before his death he was heard to say, "Lord, though I am a 
miserable and wretched creature, I am in covenant with Thee 
through grace, and I may, I will come to Thee for Thy people. 
Thou hast made me, though very unworthy, a mean instru- 
ment to do them some good and Thee service, and many of 



32 

them have set too high a value upon me, though others wish, 
and would be glad of my death ; but Lord, however Thou 
dispose of me, continue and go on to do good for them. Give 
them consistency of judgment, one heart, and mutual love ; 
and go on to deliver them, and with them the work of refor- 
mation, and make the name of Christ glorious in the world. 
Teach those who look too much on Thy instruments, to de- 
pend more upon Thyself. Pardon such as desire to trample 
upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are Thy people too, 
and pardon the folly of this short prayer, even for Jesus 
Christ's sake. Amen." Again during the night, he was 
heard muttering to himself, " Truly God is good, indeed He 
is. He will not leave me." In this spirit of humility, of 
charity toward his enemies, of zeal for God's cause, of trust 
in His mercy, the great soul of Oliver Cromwell passed 
away. May we not hope to peace I 



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